Monday, June 21, 2010

Free Printable Games for Car Rides and Restaurants

Is it just me, or do children become nearly impossible to entertain once school sets them free for the summer?

A ride in the car or lunch out just doesn’t seem to be doing the trick by themselves. So, I spent the day looking for things to make car trips and dinners out a bit more bearable.

So here’s a few I like…

Family Fun has a great collection of games that you can print out and take with you. There’s matching, memory games, puzzles, word finds, mazes and quizzes. They come in lots of different themes, but for sometimes I think the people who select the images for the memory games are a little off kilter. Like the back to school one has pictures of carrots and pasta. I just don’t get it. It’s a Disney production, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. I know I’ve posted this site before, but they update it quite a bit. And they have a good newsletter. Just sayin’.

Mom’s Minivan has a great version of the travel favorite, Road Bingo. They also have tic-tac-to and battleship. A game of battleship kills just enough time for your food to be served when you’re eating out. It’s kind of a strange site, like one of those paid Mommy Blogger sites with freebies and other weirdness. But, the printable are cute and they did make a good point about putting the print outs in Ziploc bags and using dry erase markers.

Here’s another great printable road board game set. It involves you owning a dry erase board and magnetic strips or printable magnetic paper. It’s cool looking. I’d make it if I thought my son would play with it more than once. But to be honest, I’m feeling a little too much like an underachiever to do make it. Oh, and I just noticed that it too, is from Disney. What’s with me and Disney printables today?

This printable paper city made by Joel (Joel, did I tell you how sexy-good this is? It’s wonderful!) would be great for restaurants because it could be popped up and folded down quickly. Poke around his blog because there’s also cars and a helicopter to go with this. But, that’s not the coolest thing on his blog….

These are….

Isn’t that just brilliant? They are lovely paper circles that you (or your kids, if you have to give them up) can build with. What a beautiful, simple design! Why or why am I so cursed that I can’t think of clever, wonderful things like this? It’s another of Joel’s printable toys and games. Check out his suggestion for packaging them. They look so awesome that they’d make a great printable gift for an office mate or nearly-almost friend.

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Credits

Thanks to my sister, Stephanie Yvonne Corchado-Castaneda for all her help cleaning up and restoring this blog back to its previous state. There's a lot of work to go, girl, and I'm happy you're here to help me!! Also thanks to Jimmy Lawrence for helping me with the actual blog template itself.

Printing Instructions

Most FreePrintableFun designs are best saved to your computer and printed from your graphics program. Printing from the browser might result in images that are larger or smaller than intended.